by Gail Bowen
“He wrote to me.” I opened my bag, took out Kevin’s letter and slid it across the desk. “This came the day he died.”
He read the letter and then handed it back to me. “Kevin was a very simple boy,” he said sadly.
“He was a murderer,” I said.
Paschal Temple touched his fingertips together and, for a few moments, he looked at them with great concentration. Then he raised his eyes to mine. “No,” he said, “I don’t believe Kevin was a murderer.”
The room was so quiet I could hear the ticking of the wall clock. On the desk in front of me, Lolita Temple held her strawberry shortcake up to the camera. I felt as if I had turned to glass.
The Reverend Temple’s voice was filled with concern. “Can I get you something Mrs. Kilbourn? Tea? Water?”
I shook my head.
“Then I’ll explain myself,” he said. “I guess I should start by telling you that if you hadn’t come to me, I would have come to you. Until this week, I had looked upon Kevin’s conversations with me as confidential, ‘under the seal’ as the Roman Catholics say.”
“Two people are dead, and I’m in serious trouble,” I said. “Surely that changes things.”
“It does,” he agreed. “That’s why I’m talking to you now. But Mrs. Kilbourn, you mustn’t get your hopes up. Kevin Tarpley never gave me a full and frank confession of wrongdoing. He was a troubled young man with some persistent questions. That’s all we have to go on.”
“It’s better than what I have now,” I said.
Paschal Temple looked at me closely. “As they say here at Bread of Life, ‘Half a loaf is better than none.’ ”
“That’s a terrible joke,” I said.
“I know, but it made you smile, and that makes me feel hopeful. Let’s begin at the beginning, Mrs. Kilbourn. The first time I met Kevin Tarpley was after my weekly prayer service at the penitentiary. I asked Kevin why he’d come, hoping, as you can imagine, for some indication of searching or need. But do you know what he said?”
I shook my head.
“He said, ‘Some guy told me if I come to chapel, they’ll parole me earlier.’ That was Kevin. He had been in jail for six years without inquiring about the avenue to parole, but when someone he barely knew told him that going to chapel was the route to follow, he went to chapel. It would never have occurred to him to question the validity of the argument or the reliability of the source. He was very limited intellectually, Mrs. Kilbourn. I had counselling sessions with him twice a week for six weeks, and I was constantly surprised that a fellow like that had been allowed to live on his own. He was one of those sad cases that our society allows to slip through the cracks: not so severely limited that social services could step in, but certainly not capable of making decisions for himself.”
I closed my eyes, and Maureen Gault was there, derisive, boasting. “I can make people do things.” That’s what she’d said the night of Howard Dowhanuik’s dinner. I thought of the scene on the highway. What had she made Kevin Tarpley do?
My heart was pounding. “What did he talk about in your sessions?”
“Lies,” said Paschal Temple. “He agonized over a lie he had told. He asked me repeatedly how bad it was to tell a lie. And I told him repeatedly that he should ask God’s forgiveness and then he should tell the truth. It wasn’t enough. Finally, not long before he died, he told me what was troubling him. ‘What do you do,’ he asked, ‘if one person is hurt by the lie, but another person is hurt by the truth?’ I told him he would have to work out who was being hurt more, and then I showed him that passage about responsibility and judgement that he quoted in his letter to you. That seemed to turn the tide for him. He accepted Christ as his Saviour that night, and he told me he knew now that he had to tell the truth.”
“And then he was murdered,” I said. “Did he tell you the name of the person who would be hurt by the truth?”
“No,” he said. “But as I remember it, there was only one other person with him on the highway the night your husband was killed.”
Kevin Tarpley’s letter lay on the table in front of me. The anguish even the physical act of printing had cost him was apparent in every carefully formed word.
“This wasn’t the only letter,” I said. “The prisoner in the cell across from him said there were two more.”
Paschal Temple nodded. “Kevin told me he had three letters to write.”
I pointed to the words Kevin had so laboriously printed on the bottom of the publicity picture for Howard Dowhanuik’s roast.
“Did he ask you about this quote? From what you’ve said about Kevin Tarpley’s intellectual capacity, it doesn’t seem likely he would have found it on his own.”
Paschal Temple read the words aloud. “ ‘Put not your trust in rulers. Psalm 146,’ ” he said. “I didn’t tell him about that passage, at least not directly.”
There was a battered briefcase on the floor beside him. He reached into it, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was a photocopied sheet labelled “Biblical Character Building Chart.” Beneath the title were two neat columns. The first was headed “Character Building Qualities,” the second, “Character Destroying Qualities.” Under “Character Building Qualities,” words like “Abstinence” and “Morality” and “Thrift” were followed by a biblical reference, chapter and verse.
Paschal Temple leaned across and pointed to an entry in the column labelled “Character Destroying Qualities.” “Wilful Blindness. Psalm 146.” “There’s your quote, Mrs. Kilbourn, and Kevin did have a copy of this sheet. I gave it to him. I give copies of this to a lot of the fellows at the penitentiary.”
Unexpectedly, he grinned. “Mrs. Kilbourn, you have the same look on your face you had when the man beside you began speaking in tongues.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I guess I’m uncomfortable with this kind of thing.”
“We don’t all come to God in the same way,” he said gently. “And whatever you may think of these little spiritual shortcuts, for some people they’re just the ticket. The Reinhold Niebuhrs of this world are few and far between, you know.”
“You read Reinhold Niebuhr?” I asked.
“A cat can look at a king,” he said kindly, and I could feel myself redden with embarrassment.
“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” he said. “That passage I used as a text for the sermon tonight tells us that knowledge will ‘vanish away.’ It also tells us that there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them all is love. Maybe that passage will lead you to an understanding of what Kevin Tarpley did. And Mrs. Kilbourn, perhaps if you come to understand Kevin, you’ll be able to forgive him.”
I stood up. “Thank you,” I said.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t really very helpful,” he said as he walked me to the door.
I turned and faced him. “You were,” I said. “More than you know.”
As I drove south on Albert Street, I tried to do what Paschal Temple had urged me to do. I tried to think about faith and hope and love. I tried to make myself understand that Kevin Tarpley had lied because he loved Maureen Gault. I tried to picture the love he felt for her. But try as I might, the only image I could summon was the image of Maureen Gault killing my husband. It blocked out everything else. Those pale eyes had looked into Ian’s eyes as she raised her arm and then brought the crowbar down on the side of his skull.
I was still seeing through a glass, darkly.
CHAPTER
6
I slept badly and woke up with a headache and a sense of foreboding so acute that it took an act of will just to put on my sweats and sneakers. The run along the lakeshore with the dogs seemed endless, and by the time I got into the Volvo to drive Angus to his basketball practice and Taylor to her art class, I felt as if my nerve ends were exposed. The scene inside the car didn’t help. The radio was blasting something loud and dissonant, and in the back seat Taylor was tormenting her brother about Brie, the girl w
ho’d moved from L.A.
I turned down the sound, punched the button to change stations, then angled around towards Taylor.
“Stop it, T,” I said. “I mean it.”
Angus leaned over to his sister. “She means it. I can tell by her voice.”
“Thank you, Angus,” I said, and I snapped on my seatbelt and pulled out of the driveway.
“Top of the hour on your Rock and Roll Heaven Weekend,” said the man on the radio. “Here’s a celestial six-pack: Karen Carpenter, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and Marvin Gaye, Six Greats Whose Stars Shine Bright Even After Death!”
“I hate that station,” said T.
“You can borrow my Discman,” Angus said; then he hissed, “but listen, if you even breathe wrong, I’m taking it back.”
At College Avenue, we had to stop for a funeral procession. As I sat and watched the hearse and the mourners go by, Karen Carpenter sang about how love had put her on the top of the world.
We dropped Angus at the Y, and Taylor hopped in the front seat with me. As we drove to the Mackenzie Gallery, she filled me in on her new art teacher.
“His name is Fil with an F,” she said. “He wears a sleeve on his head, and he says if you understand planes, you can draw anything.”
“Planes?” I said. “Planes like at the airport?”
Taylor shook her head. “Is that another one of your jokes, Jo?”
“No,” I said, “it’s not. I really don’t understand.”
“Planes like on your face.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “Except,” she said, “you’re like me. No planes. Just chipmunk cheeks.”
“Thanks, T,” I said. “I needed cheering up.”
She undid her seatbelt and slid across the seat towards me. “I love you, Jo.”
I looked at her worried face. She’d only been with me two years, not secure yet.
“I love you, too, Taylor,” I said. “Now get your seatbelt back on.”
“We’re almost there.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Snap!”
Most Saturdays I used the two hours when Taylor was at her art lesson to run errands, but that morning I didn’t feel like braving the eyes of the curious in the mall. I remembered the visiting exhibition of Impressionist landscapes at the gallery. I decided I could use an infusion of incandescent light and pastoral peace.
It helped. As I walked through the still rooms, I could feel my pulse slow and my mind clear. Paschal Temple’s revelation had shaken me. For six years I had lived with the fact that Ian’s death had been random, a chance occurrence in a fatalist’s tragedy. But if Maureen Gault had killed Ian, the character of the tragedy changed. In the months after Ian’s murder I had tormented myself imagining what his death must have been like. But as frightening as the movie in my head was, it lacked specifics. Darkness. Shadows. A spill of blood on the snow. I could never bring Kevin Tarpley into focus. Maureen Gault was another matter. When I closed my eyes, she was there, pale eyes flat with menace, thin mouth curled in triumph, as she ended Ian’s life. Oh, I could see Maureen all right. But try as I might, what I couldn’t see was why she had killed my husband.
I checked my watch as I came out of the exhibit. Taylor would be in her lesson for another hour. I wandered through the lobby. In the corner was a rack of brochures for tourists. I rejected the ones for other galleries and museums in our city, and chose one entitled “Tips for Healthy Living.” It was full of robust good sense:
Nutrition – Eat Right
Physical Fitness – Exercise Regularly
Stress – Learn to Cope
Accident Prevention – Practise Safety
Communicable Diseases – Practise Prevention
I put it back in the rack. Now that I had the key, Healthy Living would be easy. I checked my watch again. I still had almost an hour. Time enough to fight stress by coping. Jill had left me a pass for the video library at Nationtv; I could go over the tapes of Ian’s death and the trial and see if there was anything I’d missed.
When I pulled into the parking lot behind the station, Janis Joplin was singing “Me and Bobby McGee.” I was still humming the tune as I crossed the lobby and took the elevator upstairs. The young woman working in the video library was wearing Doc Martens, and she had a small diamond in her nose. When I asked for the Ian Kilbourn file she said, “You mean the whole thing?”
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” I said.
She chewed her gum thoughtfully. “Is that a yes?”
I nodded. “That’s a yes.”
As I headed out of the library with my armload of tapes, she called me back.
“This one goes with the file, too,” she said, and she balanced another tape carefully on the pile I was holding.
I looked at the name on the spine: “Heinbecker Funeral.” It was the tape Jill had mentioned the afternoon Angus and I had come to Nationtv. She had said then that the eulogy Ian had given for Charlie Heinbecker had been terrific.
As soon as I got into the editing suite, I put the Heinbecker tape in the VCR. I was in the mood for something terrific.
I fast-forwarded past scenes of the mourners arriving, the choir processing, and the minister praying. Before I had a chance to prepare myself for it, Ian’s image was on the screen. As I watched my husband deliver Charlie Heinbecker’s eulogy, I think I stopped breathing.
It was apparent that the video had been shot by an amateur. Periodically, the camera would jerk away from Ian to focus on the members of Charlie’s family in the front pews. The transitions were too abrupt, and often the images the camera captured were out of focus. None of that mattered to me. Jill had been right. Ian was terrific that day. He quoted Tennyson (“I am a part of all that I have met …/How dull it is to pause, to make an end/To rust unburnished, not to shine in use”), and he talked about stewardship and our obligation to others.
Good words, but it was Ian’s face, not his words, that drew me closer to the screen. He had less than three hours to live, and he didn’t know it. He didn’t know that today was the day the dragon waited at the side of the road. In a gesture I had seen ten thousand times, Ian brushed back his hair with his hand, and I felt something inside me break. Tired of holding the pieces together, I closed the door to the editing suite and gave in.
Crying helped. By the time the monitor showed the mourners leaving the church, I had distanced myself from what was happening on the screen. As I watched for Ian, I was in control again. Finally, he came out, and the camera zoomed in for a closeup. For a moment, he stood blinking as the December light bounced off the snow. Then he started down the church steps, and the camera arced away from him and began to follow another cluster of mourners as they moved from the church to the street. I was leaning forward to punch the stop button when Ian stepped into camera range again. Blurred but recognizable, he began walking down the street. He didn’t get far before a slight figure in a dark jacket came up behind him, reached out, and touched his shoulder. Ian turned. Then the camera made another of its convulsive transitions, and I was looking at the pallbearers carrying Charlie’s casket out of the church.
I hit the rewind button. The first time, I rewound too far. Then I fast-forwarded past the sequence I needed to see. It took awhile, but finally my husband and his murderer were on screen. I pressed stop.
Maureen’s back was to the camera, but her white-blond bouffant was unmistakable, and the baseball jacket she was wearing was the one she would be arrested in a few hours later. Ian was looking straight into her face. What did he see there?
I touched the rewind button. Ian turned from Maureen and, in the robotic walk of an actor in a silent movie, my husband and the woman who was about to kill him moved away from one another. If I kept rewinding, I could change the outcome. I could defeat death. But as I watched the mourners at Charlie’s funeral walking backwards up the steps of the church, I knew I couldn’t rewind the tape forever. I flicked on the lights in the editing s
uite. It was time to push the button marked “forward.” I blew my nose, threw the Heinbecker tape into my handbag, and collected the others to take back to the library.
When Taylor and I pulled up in front of our house, Jess Stephens was standing at the front door. He handed me the worm-cake recipe.
“That’s from my mum,” he said.
There was no note with the recipe, but at least Sylvie had let him come over. That was a start.
“Can he stay for lunch?” Taylor asked.
“It’s okay with me,” I said, “but he’d better check at home.”
Taylor stepped closer to Jess. She was looking at his face appraisingly. “Great planes,” she said.
Jess looked baffled.
“Taylor’s learning how to draw faces in her art class,” I said.
“You’d be good to draw, Jess,” Taylor said.
“No, thanks,” he said.
I looked at him. Taylor was right. Jess would be good to draw. His cheekbones were high and well defined, and his eyes had the slightly upward tilt you sometimes see in Slovenes. Somewhere along the line, an ancestor of the O’Keefes or the Stephenses must have spent some quality time in Eastern Europe.
Taylor grabbed Jess’s hand. “Go call your mum. Then we can look at Jack.”
I followed them down the hall and watched through the kitchen window as they went out on the deck. Taylor immediately pressed her face against the pumpkin, peering into his right eye hole. Then she moved back to let Jess look. As I turned from the window, I thought that November had been kinder to Jack than it had to me. His rate of disintegration had slowed in the chill.
When Hilda came in, she gave me a sharp look. “I’d say ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ but from the look on your face, I don’t think I’d be pleased with my purchase.”
“I’m thinking about death and decay,” I said.
Hilda picked up a knife and began buttering bread. “Not elegiacally, I take it.”
“I had a lousy morning,” I said. I went to the fridge and took out a block of cheddar. Everybody liked grilled cheese. As I sliced the cheddar, I told Hilda about the funeral tape. When I finished, her face was grim.
